The Hand to Heart Project (a program of NH-VT Palliative Services)

Since 2007, The Hand to Heart Project (a program of NH-VT Palliative Services, a New Hampshire nonprofit corporation) has been providing the comfort of massage and compassionate touch to people with cancer, and to their caregivers. Our service is free and provided in clients' homes. The program now covers approximately 100 towns in western New Hampshire and southeastern and southwestern Vermont. We work with people who are going through treatment for their cancer, and with people who have ended treatment and are approaching the end of life. We also offer the service to the caregivers of people with cancer.

We have been expanding in the last couple of years, more than tripling the number of towns in which we are available and increasing the number of massage therapists in the program to sixteen. We are reaching more people in more places than ever. With that success comes the need for more support. We need to broaden our base of financial support so that we can continue providing our service to people with cancer, and to their caregivers. It’s a service that one family member of a client once called “a small miracle of suffering made easier through healing touch and presence.”

This year, we will make over one thousand home visits to cancer patients and family members, some of them to people who can get onto a massage table (we always have one with us) and receive what to most people would look like a standard massage, and some to people who cannot get onto a table and receive the hands-on work while in a chair or bed. While many of our clients are in treatment for cancer and hoping or expecting to be well again, we also work with people in the last weeks, days, and even hours before death. Clients and their family members have told us often how much help the Hand to Heart home visits are; one woman said it was the most important connection she made after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. 

Supporting The Hand to Heart Project is a wonderful way to help people in dozens of communities find moments of physical and spiritual peace during extraordinarily difficult times. Not such a small miracle, really.